Information Rage Coming Soon To an Office Near You 201
digitaldc submitted the latest excuse to get a few days off: "A survey released this week revealed the latest affliction to hit white-collar workers. It's called 'information rage,' and almost one in two employees is affected by it. Overwhelmed by the torrent of data flooding corporate workplaces, many are near the breaking point.
The aftermath of all this is the deterioration in quality that occurs when flustered employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard. Almost three quarters of the survey's respondents declared their work has suffered as a result."
Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to noise) (Score:1, Interesting)
I find if I start getting too much e-mail I just start ignoring it until someone actually talks to me either over the phone or in person. I mean, staying connected is one thing but having a team of about 10 people constantly CC'ing each and every member on every possible topic is bloody useless.
Believe me I don't want to ignore information but I honestly don't have time to go through hundreds of e-mail every day and pick out the ones that are actually meant for me based on context or content. I actually have a job outside sorting e-mail (odd I know).
Am I crazy here?
Isn't this universal? (Score:5, Interesting)
employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard
I'd think this is the human condition, at least since the invention of the printing press.
In addition, everybody has a level at which they can effectively cull information, and a level of work that individually and organizationally is considered 'standard'. Unless more information actually produces a lower quality of work than a smaller amount of information -- with the same distribution of relevance -- would.
It seems like this would boil down to prioritization more than anything else.
Paralysis by analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
Paralysis by analysis is what we always called it. You can't get anything done because you have to large amount of information about every decision available to decide and even if you can you want to wait for more data in hopes making a better decision. Eventfully you just end up feeling impotent because nothing is happening; next you just start doing stuff without considering any information just to see something actually happen.
Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois (Score:4, Interesting)
I do the same since e-mail is documentation (CYA) and it's much easier to prioritize. My office phone went on the fritz more than a week ago and I really don't care when it's fixed.
Re:TL;DR (Score:3, Interesting)
Those of us who are hyperlexes benefit from it, dyslexics suffer. One in two sounds about right; half the population have two digit IQs.
Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois (Score:5, Interesting)
You're not crazy at all.
Email is abused and not used correctly for its purpose. Most projects I have worked on in the last couple of years use planning software and web interfaces to collaborate. This way, the project is broken down into manageable sections and assigned to very specific groups. All of the documentation and materials is posted to these sections and anybody can view the modifications and add or edit them. Notes, comments, etc. can be added to action items and we can see at a glance the status of any specific task.
Email cannot do this. You end up with a clusterfuck of email messages from people that can be unrelated to your specific task and multiple versions of documentation that you need to track down in 200 attachments. You need to communicate with that one vendor? Search through 5,000 emails to find his email address instead of looking through a contact list in the project management software. Email just does not make sense.
I don't experience this anymore. People that are not used to it and start the email overload with me usually get handled pretty quickly and are admonished that email is not an acceptable form of professional communication for our projects. Even the management gets onboard pretty quick because they like it more than email too. Probably something about people responding directly to their task or trouble ticket with timestamps and notes.
Re:Agree with Parent (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Project Manager, I interpret this a little differently.
First off - I agree with you. Clueless PM's do those things.
OTOH, smart PMs make your life easier. They don't waste your time by giving you ambiguous specs without supporting, easy-to-grasp graphics. They acts as a buffer between you and the clueless, so you can spend your time coding and not constantly switching gears for a feature that will never get implemented. They consult with you _before_ the spec to ask if the method they suggest works, or if there's a better way of serving the same business need. If anyone is going to pad the schedule, it darned well better be the PM to ensure higher-ups don't slash testing time as unnecessary. Plus, a smart PM knows it takes time to build trust with the people doing the actual work, but when you get there, you get a high-functioning team.
Sorry your PMs have sucked, dude.
Re:Agree with Parent (Score:3, Interesting)
Adding the new intermediate and hash symlink to the apache truststore
Adding a FileChain directive to all affected vhosts
Notifying all of your customers that they need to update their truststores in the next 30 days if they wish to continue doing business with you
Realizing that you're going to have to repeat this maintenance for all 400 Verisign certs for the next year (because business partners require yearly renewals)
Having to go through your companies bullshit change-management process, rather than using the rubber stamp renewal template that you spent 2 days creating.
And worst of all, trying to explain all of this to your manager, who has no understanding of the concepts "encryption" and "trust".
5-10 minutes (renew, propagate file, roll apache servers, update asset management) becomes a Full time job for one year.
The majority of which could have been avoided if they had followed your advice "7 years ago" and shelled out for a wildcard cert.
Re:Agree with Parent (Score:3, Interesting)
What you're saying may in fact be true in your experience.
But if you're managing your time, getting stuff in from whomever you need to get it from, working on other stuff when you've got dependencies not being met, and kicking off output on a regular basis, you're doing everything you can.
Go home at a reasonable hour if you're overloaded, there is always tomorrow. If you're working late nights and weekends something is wrong.
If you do 99 things for the boss everyday and people keep finding 150 more for you to do, you need to have an honest discussion with your manager. If the quality of your work is not an issue a smart manager will get you help. If he's not smart, he will need at least 2 people to replace you when you leave.
One of my best bosses I ever had asked for a status every week, he asked for what we did (duh) but also what our dependencies were, any real obstacles in our way, and what we had on our schedule which was really just your to do list. These were so he could try to manage the workload, and get bodies in to help IF that was what was needed. Some tasks he understood could be farmed out, others would take longer to explain than just to do them.
Re:Maybe. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right, it is hard to tell which is which. The guy who just moved in on your project and appears to be a slacker could already be on the verge of being overworked from his previous assignment. Very hard to tell, and the warning signs are often overlooked. In the past 2 years I've seen 4 cases of burn-out happen around me, and I've been close myself.
Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a fairly large corporation. If you call somebody, you will usually reach their voicemail (everyone is given a VoIP phone number and a voicemail by default). They will only answer if they owe you a lot or if they are in a VERY good mood in that moment. But IM... that's something else.
Our corporate IM knows when you have a meeting in Calendar and automatically puts your account in DND mode (regardless how you manually set your client). One can still write IMs to you, but they'll pop up after your meeting ends. If you lock your machine, you're automatically being set to away. After business hours (which you define in the system), it automatically sets you to Extended Away (if your machine is locked). So I have a very good chance to know if someone's free, in a meeting, away or gone home.
E-mail is to be used for meaningful communications addressed to groups of people who are interested due to their job specifics. That part is fulfilled by mailing lists. The e-mail source can be either an individual or a generic e-mail address, created for specific purposes (corporate comms, local comms, LOB comms, office comms, floor comms, etc.).
One of the biggest problems I see after looking at how my colleagues manage their e-mail is the lack of rules. EVERYTHING comes to their Inbox, they never have time to clean it up, guess what happens. Information Rage at its best. "But-but-but I have a gazillion e-mails in my Inbox!". Yes, of you're a dumbass who can't set up a mail rule, you deserve it. I offered to help out many people with setting up rules, they said "I don't have time for this". Well guess what, you make up those 2 hours spent on creating rules in 2 days worth of e-mails.
I have 147 e-mail rules now and I add a couple every week or so. They are split into two types: local rules and server rules; server rules prevail, because I use multiple clients in multiple locations. Anything that doesn't fit a rule comes into my Inbox for review. Everything else comes in its own specific mail folder. Once a month I move old mails to a Local Folder which I back up.
Profit!
The results are impressive (to my management chain and colleagues at least). I can pull up any message, no matter how old, in a matter of minutes (and I have 8+ GB of it after 3.5 years of work) and follow up on it if needed. I can cover my ass anytime by pulling out a sent e-mail if someone asks why didn't this happen (and usually it's their fault, and this way I can prove that to them). The e-mails are well indexed, with priorities and so on.
You want a summary from 2 years ago telling this story about that team in those locations? Give me 5 minutes and I produce a dozen e-mails about it. No headaches, no rage, no "can't".
Took me days to set up this system, indeed, but it paid its value many times over since then.